Look Beyond the Surface to Know the Future

I’m fortunate to be in one of those rare “between projects, take inventory, reflect and reorient” periods, that I know I too often have frittered away before I came to know their value. After being head down and focused on a project for the better part of eight months, I’m catching up on lots of things – including blogging.

This morning I stumbled across two videos from Chief Learning Officer magazine that I thought encapsulate where learning technology is and how we learning professionals need to think/prepare for it.

Both feature Casper Moerck, head of learning technology at Siemens. In the first, he talks about the state and future of learning technologies being quite muddled and uncertain.

While I agree with everything Moerck says in this video, I do think that there is a strong movement to building learning technology ecosystems with multiple tools that are interoperable with each other and other “non-learning” technologies. This puts a great pressure on the development of secure connector (enterprise safe versions of IFTTT or Zapier), data interoperability standards (xAPI), and understanding of such tools by learning professionals.

In the second video, Moerck advocates for learning professionals to gain a basic understanding of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing.

Again, I agree with all he says in this video, but I would extend the need for and benefit of this basic understanding to beyond understanding the technology and being able to check vendor claims.

Understanding AI, ML, and NLP (along with augmented/virtual reality and the Internet of Things) will also be required because they are going to dramatically impact instructional design, delivery of learning experiences, and our ability to report the success of those experiences.

Your turn: Are you personally addressing your knowledge in these areas? How is your learning team preparing? Please share your thoughts in the reply section below.

4 Responsibilities of the Learning Professional

The founders of the communities of practice movement outline what helps a community success and what can cause it to fail. Annotations: Success factors Passion for domain Internal leadership Energized core group Focus on practice Trust Community rhythm Learning trumps power Personal touch: High value for time High expectations Engaged sponsorship Skilled sup […]

APR 2019 - Thalheimer presents his LTEM approach to learning evaluation - an alternative to the Fitzpatrick 4 level model that has been in place in corporate training since the 1950's. While LTEM does cover the same types of "evaluation" and Fitzpatrick, which he characterizes as invalid and not based in anything evidentiary, it goes well beyo […]

DEC 2018 - Hagel argues that to truly embrace life long learning, we need to rethink our institutions, restructuring them to enable employees to explore their passions with other who share those passions. He argues that this would empower greater learning, innovation and productivity. The focus of these new institutions will be to drive scaleable learning. A […]

MAR 2013 - John Hegel and John Seeley Brown discuss the need for industrial innovation as a foundational component of new organizational architectures to ensure the flexibility and innovation required in a world economy that is continually accelerating. They argue that key to the effort to drive innovation, creative spaces have been showing promise. Annotati […]

MAR 2018 - This compilation of articles by Mike Taylor is a treasure trove of top of the industry thinking regarding collaboration and workplace learning. Definitely worth bookmarking and coming back to over and over again. Tags: curation collaboration modern workplace learning […]

JAN 2018 - Simon Terry looks at the factors that help people adapted to a more connected, collaborative workplace. Providing quality and consistent examples of desired behaviors, actively encouraging collaboration and the right activities are the human dimension of collaboration in communities. Annotations: Ensuring your people have the tools to collaborate […]

xxx 20xx - This is a great, high-level walkthrough of the structure of an LRS (Learning Record Store). Annotations: The first step is to get an in-depth understanding of the complete xAPI specification itself LRSs have to be able to handle every possible request an activity provider could send and are responsible for validating those requests If you decide t […]